Gulf Energy Information takes the judging of the HP Awards to be a serious matter. In the interest of transparency, the methodology is detailed below:

1. HP Awards 'call for award nominations' is published as an advertisement for three months via the Hydrocarbon Processing website and print publication. E-mail alerts are sent out, as well.

2. The award nominations that are received are sorted into their award category. A staff member passes the sorted category nominations to Hydrocarbon Processing's Editor.

3. The Editor of Hydrocarbon Processing organizes and sends the nominations to a third-party advisory board. This board consists of operating companies, EPCs, licensors, consultants and equipment/service companies. The judging team, independently of each other, read each of the submissions. The criteria for scoring includes:

The abstract meets the criteria of the category. For "Lifetime Achievement" and "Most Promising Engineer", self-nominations are not permitted.

If the technology, product or initiative falls within the past year. This ensures that the technology is the latest in the industry.

How worthy it is of being a finalist, as documented in the nomination (maximum 400 words).

The Hydrocarbon Processing advisory board grades each submission and the top five abstracts are selected as finalists. Some categories may have fewer than five finalists depending on the number of abstracts received for that category. Note: A board member cannot judge a category in which their employer/technology is a finalist.

All scores are tabulated, with the highest scoring being deemed the winner of that specific category. In the unlikely event of a tie, the technologies will be resent to the advisory board to rescore.

To protect the impartiality of the Advisory Board members who judge the final winners, their names are not displayed on the Hydrocarbon Processing website.

The winners of each category are announced in a special awards gala. Only the Editor and Events Director of Hydrocarbon Processing will have knowledge of the technology award winners prior to the awards gala.